Crop cultivation and the rearing of livestock in the open spaces of large third world cities have reached the point where their importance as a part of the urban informal sector can no longer be overlooked. In East Africa, several recent surveys have confirmed that urban cultivation, carried on largely by women, is both prevalent and vital to the livelihood of a significant proportion of the population (Freeman 1991; Rakodi 1988; Mazingira Institute 1987). These surveys complement a rather slim body of previous field research focused specifically on urban agriculture in Africa. Most of the latter deal with cities in Francophone central and west Africa (Vennettier 1988, 1972, 1961; Jeannin 1972; Morriniere 1972; Lassere 1958). A number deal with cultivation in the peri-urban fringe (Swindell 1988; Guyer 1987; Haubert 1985). The general conclusion of these studies is that many urban households, at all income levels, produce a considerable proportion of their own subsistence needs. The more recent evidence further suggests that, despite a relatively short history in large African cities like Nairobi, cultivation of open spaces by women seems set to become even more important in the years to come.

By contrast, most studies dealing generally with African urban development and the informal sector have either ignored women cultivators altogether (International Labour Organization [ILO] 1985, 1972; Sandbrook 1982; House 1981; Rempel 1978; van Zwanenberg 1972), accorded their food-production efforts little real significance (Peil and Sada 1984, 59; Hake 1977), or viewed them as a subcategory of other, more visible activities of urban women entrepreneurs (Coquery-Vidrovitch 1991; Beavon and Rogerson 1990; Robertson 1976).

Kenya has served as a model of rural development, to be praised and lambasted, for three decades. As early as 1964 Clayton hailed it as an “agrarian revolution” (1964). As recently as 1989, Lofchie argued that it is an “agricultural ‘success story’” that has dramatically raised the real incomes of smallholder farmers while achieving one of the highest agricultural growth rates on the continent (1989, 15). Equally common are those condemning it as the archetypical example of capitalist development, impoverishing the rural poor to provide benefits to a small and internationally dependent bourgeoisie. Neither perspective is completely accurate; both need to be re-examined in light of Kenya's recent political unrest and shift to a multi-party political system. If a more open political system is sustained, rural political demands can only be understood and predicted if we understand the effects of Kenya's development model on the bulk of the population: Kenya's peasants.

The Kenyan agrarian debate has produced an unusually rich literature on the effects of capitalist development on an African peasantry. At its heart is the question of whether the emergence of a rural market economy preserves a relatively homogeneous peasantry or dissolves it into landed and landless classes. This article reappraises and contributes to the debate by arguing that directly examining the historical process of social transformation brought about by capitalist development, rather than deducing the process from cross-sectional data, suggests a single, uniform explanation of seemingly conflicting empirical material.

Although the South African state officially collected taxes only from African men, taxes had a number of effects on African women as well. This paper contends that the first tax instituted, the hut tax, although it did little to change women's social, cultural and economic status by itself, did set a precedent for treating African women as legal minors. Later taxes combined with the development of migrant labor and the declining availability of arable land in the reserves to restructure women's roles dramatically. Taxes were by no means the only or the primary cause of this restructuring, but they were an integral part of the foundation.

It is important to consider the effects of taxes on women, particularly rural women, for two reasons. First, what little secondary literature exists on the taxation of the African population concentrates on how taxes affected the supply of male migratory labor (Ramdhani 1986; Cooper 1981, 307; Marks 1970, 15, 132-3). While this is a crucial question, it tends to link taxes to labor migration solely as cause and effect while ignoring the more complex social consequences of taxes. Some of these consequences were long-term as they played themselves out in people's self-definitions, especially with regard to gender and social roles.

Second, a study of tax regulations and tax collection can provide a mirror in which are reflected the attitudes, assumptions and priorities of state officials dealing with the “Native Problem.” The imposition of the hut tax in the early years of the takeover of African societies revealed a particular view of how those societies were constructed and how white officials thought they ought to be altered.

In Sudan the postindependence era witnessed a succession of attempts by the state to intervene in the country's agricultural markets with the purpose of achieving an effective control over both the physical and financial forms of the agricultural output. The impetus underlying the state's efforts at control originates in an increasing incapacity to finance annual and long-term public expenditure and investment. Given the fact that the Sudan economy is predominantly agriculture-based, effective control over the bulk of the country's agricultural resources was considered instrumental for the resolution of the persistent fiscal problems. However, the state's efforts at controlling the agricultural economy were systematically undermined by a powerful commercial bourgeoisie. Over the three decades following political independence in 1956, the Sudanese peasants, who constitute three-quarters of the total population and produce a considerable portion of the aggregate agricultural output, seem to have been the only losers in a long-drawn scenario involving the state and the commercial bourgeoisie.

Those who follow the debate on the conditions of the Sudanese economy and society are aware of the powerful influence the country's merchant bourgeoisie exerted over the workings of the agricultural economy and the extent of the documentation of this influence. When compared to the recent contributions to the study of the economic crisis in Sudan and the role of the commercial bourgeoisie in the dictation of national policies (Barnett 1988; Elhassan 1985; Mahmoud 1984), the following analysis could be differentiated in terms of its emphasis on the link between merchant control over the state and the economic crisis, and the overall effect of the crisis on the state's attitude towards the agricultural economy.